Month: July 2012

If there’s one thing constant about businesses all around the globe then it’s the fact that there are no free lunches. This is why clients are often struck with doubts while opting for the free of cost web hosting services for their websites. What they don’t understand, is that what appears to be free on the internet isn’t always so. Other people, especially those who are new to hosting, are attracted by free hosting services, notwithstanding its several drawbacks.

If you’re new to web hosting, then selecting a good paid host is probably something you will find quite difficult. Even more so with free hosts, as most of the free web hosting services available today are meant to exploit the users rather than help. What you’re likely to experience over the first few months with a free web hosting service is lack of FTPs, lack of domain names, tiny web space, and lastly numerous advertisements by the host to reap up the money spent on space and bandwidth.

Three most important technical issues to be dealt with before looking twice at any host are space, bandwidth, and other extra features. Features offered include domain name hosting, File Transfer Protocols (FTPs), Data Base Management Systems (DBMS) et al. Free web hosts, to the best of my knowledge do NOT offer the latter one, and offer only minimal amounts of the first two. This might lead to extremely unpresentable site, sluggish download speeds, extremely low Click through rates to name a few of the problems which might arise.

Websites of today are mostly written in HTML – and in that, they come in two varieties. These are Static and Dynamic HTML. Most web hosts prefer Static HTML, and if your site has room for Dynamic hosting, then you must check out sophisticated services which have the capability to host a dynamic website. Problems you might face with DHTML scripts in a free host server are extremely low Data scope, as low as 5MB. Also, several free servers do not allow customizable domains and this leads to presentation deficiencies, when your web URL ends up with the free host’s domain and your own.

Elaborating a few more problems with URLs, since free servers host several thousands of websites in a single disk, each site gets assigned a unique IP address and this leads to several million URLs coming out of a single server. This has several network security issues. For one thing, a single file gets infected by a virus over the web, it can spread throughout and damage the entire database of the server. Also, no free server guarantees site activity and server response round the clock.

Thus, the conclusion reached hence is that free web hosting servers are only good for experimenters and complete newcomers into the scenario who have little or nothing to lose from bad site performance. Most of all, in spite of all the shortcomings, it’s FREE. Restrictions only become important when you’re aiming for something big. For all other purposes, free web hosting is a splendid tool to start you off into the web.